RustyFingers wrote:And "pro-active" has been on my hate list for the last 25 years.

Me too! It just dropped in out of nowhere. As did "pushing the envelope", which bothers me most simply because I don't understand it.

Hello Mark,

In aerodynamics, the flight envelope of an aircraft is a graph showing airspeed vs. load factor (or altitude). For small prop driven aircraft, the envelope is almost rectangular, thus the name. An aircraft is designed to fly within that 'envelope'. When a plane is pushed, i.e. when diving it at high speeds, it is said to be flying "outside the envelope", usually considered risky or dangerous.

Hope that helps. I wonder how many us try to play the guitar outside our skill envelope (chuckle)?

RustyFingers wrote:And "pro-active" has been on my hate list for the last 25 years.

Me too! It just dropped in out of nowhere. As did "pushing the envelope", which bothers me most simply because I don't understand it.

Hello Mark,

In aerodynamics, the flight envelope of an aircraft is a graph showing airspeed vs. load factor (or altitude). For small prop driven aircraft, the envelope is almost rectangular, thus the name. An aircraft is designed to fly within that 'envelope'. When a plane is pushed, i.e. when diving it at high speeds, it is said to be flying "outside the envelope", usually considered risky or dangerous.

Hope that helps. I wonder how many us try to play the guitar outside our skill envelope (chuckle)?

- Pulgar

Wonderful, Pulgar! Thank you so much. Haha, I would say my playing is stuck in the glue under the flap of the envelope.
Mark

Andrew Fryer wrote:There's an advert that claims (I can't remember the product) "up to 100% effective"
Surely it would be more impressive (but no less true) if they said "up to 110% effective"

And a while ago there was an advert that claimed "87% of 50 people agree"!

Advertisers and copy writers seem to have no grasp of either Maths or English. I'm just back from shopping, where I saw a package of Philadelphia cream cheese marked 'Original', and a bit lower down 'Now even more creamy!'. A clear case of advertisers' cognitive dissonance.

Lovemyguitar wrote:I realize that languages evolve, but that doesn't mean that certain new words do not annoy me!

What annoys me is spell-checkers that try to make me use a 'z' in realise.

I wonder if spell-check designers are now the main force in changing language.

Ah, well it depends if the language of the spell-checker is set to British or American English as to whether it favours s or z (which, of course, is pronounced "zed"), or whether it allows us to write "favours" as I just did. That's a good point, though -- spell checkers, especially on phones, often change entire words, which can be amusing or simply baffling.

Lovemyguitar wrote: . . .spell checkers, especially on phones, often change entire words, which can be amusing or simply baffling.

So very true. A recent exhange I had with 'predictive' text switched on during a journey to Wimbledon resulted in: 'Simpleton train in four minutes'. And my attempt at texting the word 'phenomenal' resulted in 'pheasant o.penal'.

I'm perhaps prepared to accept that the first part of the word 'phenomenal' might conceivably be interpreted by the phone's workings as 'pheasant' (!); but in what universe does 'pheasant o.penal' exist, and under what possible circumstances might it be predicted?

"She ran the whole gamut of emotions from A to B."
(Dorothy Parker on Katharine Hepburn)

A lot of them memorise everything you type in, even though some of it will be accidental. In Wordperfect it was easy to access the internal dictionaries and delete all the rubbish from time to time, but on my not so smart phone, I haven't found out yet how to get in and delete the tripe.